Systems or circuits that perform signal processing may be found in various applications such as audio/video processing, telecommunication transceivers, etc. Signal processing systems may perform different types of processing, such as filtering, transforming, merging, etc. Signal processing systems may convert signals between analog form and digital form by using analog-to-digital converters (ADC) and digital-to-analog converters (DAC). To increase speed and/or accurate, signal processing systems may each include multiple processing elements each configured to perform similar signal processing functions, and the multiple processing elements may be linked in parallel and/or in series with each other. This may also reduce the cost of designing the signal processing systems, because the multiple processing elements may be duplicated in design without the need to design and simulate each element.
However, even with duplicated designs of the multiple processing elements in a signal processing system, some mismatches in the performance characteristics of the processing elements may be unavoidable, due to variations in manufacturing. The element mismatches may cause distortions in the output signal. For example, a dominant distortion source in ΔΣ ADC's is element mismatches in the internal DAC's of the ΔΣ ADC's. To reduce the distortion caused by the element mismatches, processing elements may be periodically “shuffled” in the signal processing system. That is, the signal processing system may periodically re-route the signal channel/path configuration of the processing elements, so that the processing elements occupy different positions in the signal processing path relative to their previous positions. As the elements are shuffled over time while the signal processing system functions, the distortions due to element mismatches may be compensated. However, the element shuffling scheme may introduce additional element activities, which may introduce noise and thus may degrade the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the signal processing system.
Thus, there is a need for improved signal processing system that reduces the distortions due to element mismatches while minimizing noise due to element shuffling.